Abstract

Children develop morphological awareness, or the understanding of words,throughout the primary school years and this helps them understand and usegrammatical rules. It is possible that children gain a large part of this understandingfrom general years of experience with language or alternatively, from developingtheir reading skills. The aim of the current study was to explore how children usemorphological awareness in reading and spelling, as well as how children withdifferent reading abilities use morphological awareness. The main hypothesis wasthat the development of morphological awareness is influenced more by a child'sreading ability than by their experience with language. Seventy-one primary schoolstudents from Grades 3, 4, and 5 from schools in the Hobart area (age M = 10 years,2 months; SD = 10.7 months) completed the Word Identification reading subtestfrom the WRMT and the spelling subtest from the WRAT as well as experimentaltests of real words and pseudowords along with a morphological awareness task. Theresults show that children with similar reading abilities tended to have similar scoresacross experimental measures, and that children with higher morphologicalawareness performed better on the reading and spelling tasks. This seems to supportthe assertion that it is reading ability, not experience with language, whichcontributes most to the development of morphological awareness.

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Available for use in the Library and copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968, as amended. Thesis (MPsych(Clin))--University of Tasmania, 2011. Includes bibliographical references